


transition to the end of the world

by orphan_account



Category: OFF (Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-05-01
Packaged: 2017-12-09 19:43:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/777297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an idea of how zacharie and sucre/sugar are connected- based off a headcanon i saw on tumblr that she is his puppeteer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Zone 0

Not everyone has a puppeteer.

The ones that do don’t know when they’ll get theirs. It can be a spur of the moment thing, a knock at the door and a few plastered on smiles, or it can be gradual, picking your way up a mountainside but once you get connected to their strings you only fall back down again.

Being a puppet is not a good thing.

Outside, the day is bright, full of colour, just like it’s supposed to be. A boy named Zacharie is watching from behind his smoky window. The plastic waters sway lethargically, almost drunkenly, outside. He is wise, and informed, for a child of his age. He’s never been to this zone before. He’s heard that only a cat lives here, with the exception of the coming and going of puppets and puppeteers alike. No more life.

Just a freaking cat.

Said cat is sat before him now, some sort of shit eating grin on his face. He’s got a big forehead, which Zacharie thinks is weird for a cat. Cats are just... well, _cats._ They don’t usually have any distinguishing features other than their markings or their eyes or the occasional missing ear or tail.

Cats also aren’t meant to _grin._

Zacharie decides almost straight away that this cat is fucking _creepy._ But he doesn’t recoil in his presence, and instead waits quietly for his newly assigned puppeteer to arrive. The cat keeps trying to make light conversation, and this weirds Zacharie out even more because cats are certainly not supposed to talk either. They’re meant to go _meow_ and purr and hiss and rub against your legs and stuff. Not sit absently on the floor at your feet and talk to you about blindly trivial shit.

“The weather’s nice today.”

“Yeah, _colourful.”_

Maybe it’s Zacharie’s tone that eventually teaches the cat (or as Zacharie learns he is called, The Judge) to shut up for a while. He sits in that very feline way, leaning slightly to the left and tapping the tip of his tail on the cold stone floor.

A few minutes later (or it could’ve been hours; may as well have been, considering how bored Zacharie was) there’s a noise from outside. A kind of dull buzzing, which stops after a moment.

Then the footsteps, and a shadow in the door, blocking the white light.

It’s a girl. That’s the first thing Zacharie notices as he runs a dubious eye over her. She’s got bare feet, and he thinks they must be cold. Her clothes are all black and white, which he’s used to; he can’t remember seeing another person with colour on their clothes, actually. Sometimes Zacharie’s little heart on his jumper is the only thing that makes him feel unique. Her hair is messy, and platinum blonde, with the fringe coming down over her eyes. Her striped socks and the circles on her cheeks make her look like some sort of creepy circus performer, a macabre trapeze artist.

Zacharie’s eyes move upwards and downwards for a while. She’s only wearing an open jacket on her top half, with that looks like duct tape on her-

Zacharie realises he has never seen those things before. The world mostly consists of men, or boys, or _males,_ and the things the duct tape is on are kinda foreign to him.

Oh well.  
“Zacharie, boy,” The Judge speaks from behind him, and it is only then that Zacharie realises that he has stood up and begun to walk over to her. She is just so weird, so exotic, that he can’t quite understand what he is doing. The cat moves forward so he is between them, and the boy just scowls down at him as he parks his ass there. “This is Sucre. She is your new puppeteer.”

“Hello, Zacharie.” Her voice is ghostly, almost hollow, and Zacharie almost steps on the feline on the ground as he moves even closer. She rolls his name around her tongue in the _weirdest_ way and it’s so cool, he thinks.

“Hey.”

“Now, now, you two. You know the deal.” The Judge almost seems to clamber up Sucre’s clothes, and perches on her shoulder, but she doesn’t react. “No lovey-dovey shenanigans. You are business partners.”

“Some _business,”_ Zacharie practically spits. Imagining that The Judge is a little scrawny parrot on the girl’s shoulder makes him feel a little better, actually.

“Oh, you misunderstand. Vending is a very honest trade! I’m sure you will make a simply _excellent_ merchant, Master Zacharie.”

He turns his head slightly to the right to look sideways at Sucre.

“And you will make a wonderful puppeteer.”

She nods, but doesn’t speak again in that voice. It reminds Zacharie of a white ribbon or a plastic bag fluttering in the wind, by the edge of the plastic. Kinda lonely, desolate, whispery.

Zacharie thinks he’ll enjoy himself more than he expected.


	2. Zone 1

There’s one day he remembers best.

The weather didn’t change. It never changed. The scenery did, sometimes, though. Zacharie and Sucre find themselves on a bank. Not of grass, like you or me would imagine, but of tarmac, hot and sticky beneath their palms as they lean back and watch the sun and imagine what would happen after it set. They will be immersed in darkness, soon.

Zacharie’s learned just how businesslike Sucre can be when it comes to his vending. She’s very organised, very robotic, at times. Zacharie guesses he respects that, and half-wishes he could be so serious about a lot of things.

But Zacharie’s also probably a lot more human than she is. Two months into their partnership, as she calls it (never anything that suggests they are anything other than equals, which makes Zacharie a lot more cheerful about this) he still hasn’t seen her eyes.

And, he supposes, that was just the way it was going to be.

On the bank, conversation quickly turns to existence. Sucre has a demanding kind of curiosity about her, has always been kinda philosophical; she questions the whys and hows and whats of life frequently.

Which is strange, for someone so _ghostly_ , Zacharie thinks.

“Do you ever wonder if there’s something greater than us out there?”

A pause. Zacharie listens for a while to the wind and the rippling plastic which never seems to be far away. The hushed, panicked tones of elsens can also be heard over the peak of the slope, and Zacharie dwells for a while on how funny he thinks the little guys are.

“Greater than puppeteers?” he responds, flicking his wrist and tossing a midnight purple stone into the waves. It splits them, and they remain with a hole in them as the rock sinks before eventually closing up again.

“ _Us,_ ” Sucre reinforces. “We’re equal, you know, no matter how much that cat tries to convince us otherwise.”

 _That cat,_ Zacharie thinks.

More silence ebbs by.

“I’ve never really thought about it,” he admits.

She nods, in that solemn way of hers. He’s gathered that she very rarely has a change in emotion, almost pensive and kind of sad-looking, like a winter rose. But she smiles sometimes, too, and laughs, in a tinkling way, and although those moments are rare, Zacharie’s sure that it’s just how she is.

“What if we’re in—you know, a game or something?”

Another stone. Plip, plop.

“A game?”

Zacharie remembers games. He remembers finding a battered little box on the floor, once, when he was younger. Nobody was around so he picked it up, as curious children would be expected to do. It was a metallic blue, the paint scratched off in places to reveal a milky white plastic coating.

When he opened the lid, the inside lit up. Odd, he thought, and studied the object. Little buttons, five of them, all of different sizes, with a few more on the outer edge.

You or I would know this as a Game Boy.

The game Zacharie played featured a strange blue animal who ran fast up and across and even upside down, sometimes. It was an escape, and it made him feel unique; he’d often tell himself how certain he was that no other kid had anything like this.

Zacharie liked feeling unique.

But one day someone saw it. An elsen, one of the younger ones. (You could sometimes tell by their height or the brightness of their eyes or the length of their tie.) Had Zacharie known that his little sorry ass was going to scurry over to Alma to tell Dedan, he’d have stopped him at the door.

(but what then? Zacharie wouldn’t have _killed_ him for the sake of _a game,_ would he?)

(would he?)

Dedan took the game. That went without saying. It had been one of those times when Zacharie wished he had parked himself in one of the _nicer_ zones.

But he had moved on. This wasn’t the right kind of world to be mourning over a console in.

“Yeah,” Sugar replies, staring hollowly ahead. “A game. Like we’re just player 1 or 2, or some kind of NPC.”

Zacharie’s stumped by that. He gives her his best poker face and quietly echoes, “NPC?”

“Non-player character,” she responds shortly. Well. Maybe she knows more about these things than he does. Or he thought he did, anyway. Zacharie tries his best to understand as he stares at the side of her head. He knows that she’s noticed, even if she’s looking in the other direction.

“Oh.”

There’s a spark of something in her for a moment, something lively, curious, exciting. She sniffs the air like a hunting dog and there’s a hint of a grin on her thin, icy lips.

“That’d be cool.”

 _What do you mean, ‘cool’?_ Zacharie’s mind cries in response. _We’d have no control!_

But outwardly, he nods in agreement.

“Yeah... Yeah, it would.”


End file.
